This semester, SYP kicked off its 8th season
in style. In September, the main topic was military physics, and the session
was very special. For starters, the topic garnered great interest from students,
and a capacity number of 320 (!) students attended, which was a monumental
increase over the previous record of 250 people. Managing such a large crowd is
a great challenge, but our organizing team did a splendid job in making sure
everyone was attended to.
However, this was not the only extraordinary
thing to happen – after the popular lectures, the experimental part had
students doing all kinds of military related things, for example – decoding
messages and working with electronic sonar detectors, but the main attraction
was shooting with paintball guns and analyzing the trajectory of the paintballs
experimentally and theoretically.
Representatives
from the Canadian army arriving at the season opener session
Even this was not the most surprising thing
to happen – for the last in-depth lecture we had a representative from the
Latvian Army and two Canadian army officers – one a PhD in physics – who gave
lectures about their everyday work and the role of physics in it. This event
caught enough attention that the Army sent over a reporter crew to film the
entire process, which was a first for SYP.
Signals
Officer from Quebec giving his lecture to the audience
After the first session, attendance rates
remained very high, stabilizing at 250 attendees for every session until
December. In later sessions, we looked at
radioactivity and nuclear physics, at chemical physics and at thermal
physics. In all cases, students learned something outside of the school curriculum.
Highlights include a popular lecture introducing students to the topic of
quantum physics in chemistry and an experiment with colored ice cubes visually
demonstrating the effects of convention in a glass of water.
We’ve also commenced the third year of our
School Cup competition, allowing teams of students to represent their schools
during the season and compete for prizes at the end of the year. Each year, we
try to add new quirks to the competition, and this year the homework tasks have
been revamped to be more fun for the teams involved. At the end of the
semester, we also conducted a team quiz for teams to get a chance to score
extra points.
Altogether, the first semester of SYP’s 8th
season has been a record-setting one, and we look forward to keeping the upward
trend going in 2018.
Students
observing convection visualized via colored ice cubes
